Entertainment

'Cuphead' is like no video game I have ever seen

Studio MDHR's much-hyped first game, a 2D run-'n-gunner inspired by classics like Mega Man, Contra, and R-Type, is legit. For years, we've caught glimpses of a game that looked like a playable Silly Symphonies-era cartoon... and I'm now able to confirm: that's exactly what it is.

After playing Cuphead, I can tell you: it feels just like what it's trying to be. Each non-boss stage involves running (or, in at least one case, flying) from left to right, shooting an assortment of enemies and collecting the occasional coin. There are also standalone boss stages that typically involve taking on a single, more elaborate threat across multiple phases.

Your little hero, Cuphead, can run, jump, dash, shoot, and — with the right timing — parry certain types of attacks. He's got two main weapons — a straight-shooting long-range attack and a shotgun-style short-range spread attack — that you can switch between with the press of a button.

At the end of a stage your performance is graded, so there's always a new bar to reach for. It's exactly the kind of precision challenge that speedrunners and fans of SNES-era classics love to devour.

It's exactly the kind of precision challenge that speedrunners and fans of SNES-era classics love to devour.

But let's not mince words here: the art is what will bring in mainstream gamers. And it's really good.

Image: adam rosenberg

The secret to Cuphead's visual success is the unusual development process: everything except the colors is drawn out by hand.

"From the design right through to inking, it's all done as authentic as possible to the '30s [animation process]," Cuphead inking artist and producer Maja Moldenhauer said during my preview.

"All pencil and paper. Nothing is digital."

"All pencil and paper. Nothing is digital."

It starts with a concept, most of which come from Cuphead art director Chad Moldenhauer. He hatches an idea for something — say an enemy, or a boss — and then a group of artists plots out a rough set of moments that capture different animations: attacks, idle states, intros... that sort of thing.

These key frames, as they're called, give a sense of what the final animation will look like without the artists having to spend the time drawing every single frame. That more laborious process only happens after an animation is approved.

That's where Ms. Moldenhauer comes in.

"Once the animations are tied down and complete, it then gets sent over to me. I align the pictures digitally to make sure that we maximize our paper space — we could have anywhere from one to six frames per page," she explained.

Image: Adam rosenberg

Image: adam rosenberg

"I'll go through and ink it, and then we re-scan [the animation] and it gets colored digitally, then cut out and inserted into the game."

There's an obvious question here: if Studio MDHR is so committed to authenticity in its art design, why relegate the final part of that process — adding color — to the digital realm?

"Visually, there was no difference between hand-painting each cel and doing it digitally," Ms. Moldenhauer explained. "We didn't notice the difference, so we said, 'OK, let's take the easy road here rather than painting each cel.'"

It's important to understand the scale of things here. There's a lot of work involved even in just drawing and then inking the worlds, characters, attacks, items, and bosses of Cuphead.

A typical boss could have anywhere from 1,300 to 1,500 frames of animation.

A typical boss could have anywhere from 1,300 to 1,500 frames of animation. The watercolor backgrounds, stacked one on top of another to achieve a parallax scrolling effect as you journey from left to right, could go as many as 10 layers deep.

Image: adam rosenberg

Every frame and every painting is drawn and inked by hand. The digital coloring doesn't look any different from hand-drawn coloring in the game, but — as Studio MDHR learned early on — the inked drawings definitely do.

"When we did embark on [this project], we did some comparisons," Ms. Moldenhauer said. "We would animate digitally and ink it digitally, and then compare it to a hand drawing. You physically can't capture the look of the '30s digitally."

Yes, the process would have moved a lot faster. But there's an ineffable quality to the hand-drawn material that a computer simply can't replicate.

"When my ink pen touches paper, the chaos that it creates when the ink spreads throughout the fibers... it's to that detail that they wanted to capture in this game. And they weren't willing to waver on that, due to cost or time or anything," Ms. Moldenhauer said.

"When my ink pen touches paper, the chaos that it creates when the ink spreads throughout the fibers... it's to that detail that they wanted to capture in this game."

"We want to capture the splatter of ink, we want to capture the variance in line weights, we want to capture the tapering of lines. You just can't get that digitally."

Image: adam rosenberg

Image: Adam Rosenberg

Indeed, the results are right there on the screen. Cuphead looks like no other video game. It really is like you're taking direct control of an old Looney Tunes short. Even the music, all big band jazz that fits with the '30s period, ebbs and flows with the pace of the game.

Even after just 30 or 45 minutes — which is all the time I got to spend playing Cuphead — I walked away with the feeling that I'd just witnessed something special.

And there goes the hyperbole again. It's difficult to keep in check. Studio MDHR faced doubters galore over the four-ish years spent building Cuphead. As Ms. Moldenhauer put it, people would say things like: "You guys are crazy! What are you doing? This is not possible!"

She laughed here, thinking back over their long journey.

"That was just not in our vocabulary. When we got hooked on this and it was the vision, nothing [after that] distracted any of us."

UPDATED Aug. 22 at 3:13 p.m. ET with clarification from Studio MDHR about the number of animation frames there are for boss. The article previously stated that the range was 200-500 frames, but that just applies to an individual attack. In total, most bosses hover between 1,300 to 1,500 frames of animation.

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